Replacing democracy

[energy-village]

He in particular would make a crap leader, given that his response to the MPs expenses scandal was "Oh, let's be honest, we've all fiddled our expenses, haven't we?"

And this is a man with 4 million followers on Twitter - v influential.

[Mr. Fox]

Erm... not sure I quite follow. Please do spell it out!

Fry is a card-carrying Dawkinsite.

That's one of the 'various'...

Lol - Yep, Dawkins is probably one of Fry's main competitors in the 'smugness' stakes.

(Just so long as it's nothing to do with certain sky-pixie's apparent edicts regarding bumsex, I'm happy. )

Anyway... Why do people think we even need leaders?

They didn't make us read 'Lord of the Flies' for nothing, you know!

[sam_uk]

UE I think you have come up with the perfect system of governing a state.

So long as there are only 11 individuals who live in the state..

I often think that we get caught up in imagining that the proper scale for a political organisation is one of millions, or hundreds of millions of people. I am unsure why we so habitually make this assumption. We have ended up with states the size they are as a accident of history. There is nothing 'right' about the size of France or Germany. It is arbitrary.

My view is that diversity is good. We should have smaller states (city sized?) we as a species will still be greedy, powerhungry and occasionally inhumane, but these mistakes will be more local in character. There will be less concentrated power.

This would need to happen in the context of some binding international agreements, and perhaps an armed citizenry along the Swiss model to enforce it.

[Ludwig]

UE I think you have come up with the perfect system of governing a state.

So long as there are only 11 individuals who live in the state..

I often think that we get caught up in imagining that the proper scale for a political organisation is one of millions, or hundreds of millions of people. I am unsure why we so habitually make this assumption. We have ended up with states the size they are as a accident of history. There is nothing 'right' about the size of France or Germany. It is arbitrary.

My view is that diversity is good. We should have smaller states (city sized?) we as a species will still be greedy, powerhungry and occasionally inhumane, but these mistakes will be more local in character. There will be less concentrated power.

This would need to happen in the context of some binding international agreements, and perhaps an armed citizenry along the Swiss model to enforce it.

I think that would be a difficult system, especially in an overpopulated world. Local war would be endemic.

The advantage of large countries is economy of scale, and large-scale integration. Imagine if every county in England had to implement its own infrastructure on every level, often in competition for resources with neighbouring counties. It would be hell.

[Ludwig]

Anyway... Why do people think we even need leaders?

They didn't make us read 'Lord of the Flies' for nothing, you know!

Isn't the point of "Lord of the Flies" that leaders - often not very nice ones - emerge whether we like it or not? Golding isn't suggesting that the boys on the island somehow "made the wrong choices" - he's saying something much more sobering, namely "this is just what happens". Like all good literature it asks questions without proposing glib solutions.

[Mr. Fox]

Exactly. Jack is saved from the savage hoard by the Naval Officer, as without the guiding paternal hand of absolute authority, you will all inevitably become 'savages', because hierarchy and competition - red in tooth and claw, no less - are the sole and 'natural' basis for human relationships. Therefore, submit to hierarchy and absolute authority and be grateful for it's civilizing influence and protection from yourselves..!

Well, I suppose they were all male and English...

Then it was 'Z for Zachariah'... Only two people left on the planet: One, a young girl, the other 'just happens' to be a murdering psychopath paedophile tractor thief.

What were they trying to tell us?

[sam_uk]

"Local war would be endemic."

Possibly. At the moment national war is endemic.

It is currently designed so that it only effects a small subset of the population. If we cast aside our nationalism, and banded together in smaller groups then I reckon it might lead to more meaningful participation in political affairs. (more ability to actually effect things so more point in getting involved)

And if the consequences of going to war were that you had to pick up a rifle and go and get shot at, then you might find people started thinking twice about whether to do it.

Doing things on a city wide scale would make a federated decision making process viable in a way I don't think is possible on the massive national scale.

--------Participatory democracy--------

So each street (25 houses or so) get's together once a week, and takes the decisions that are put to it. It is the basis of the decision making body. It can also propose things for discussion. It can decide stuff however it likes, consensus, democracy, a delegated leader, a religious leader. If you don't like the way your street does things you can move, or attend the neighboring meeting instead. This builds real community at the most local level.

One representative from each street group takes their decisions or proposals to a meeting of 100 representatives of all the neighboring streets. They attempt to agree by consensus, if that does not happen within an hour they vote on the things.

(The representative sent by the street is sent to best represent the views of the 25 people. They are not supposed to push their own agenda. Because of the small scale the groups would quickly choose alternative representatives if they were not doing what the group asked.)

One representative from each meeting of a 100 goes to another meeting of 100 to represent the views of the 100 neighborhoods. They attempt to agree by consensus, if that does not happen within an hour they vote on it.

You now have a participatory decision making body for a city. On a week by week basis the city can meaningfully express it's views. New ideas and proposals can quickly propagate up and down through the system.

People would probably choose not to participate in decisions that they don't care about. I don't see why that would be a problem. On issues that people care about you would probably get good participation.

You might think that spending a couple of hours a week with your neighbours drinking tea and making decisions about your city or region would be too onerous. I suspect that actually it would be quite nice to have a meaningful democracy again, and that participating in a real community would be something most people would engage in to some extent.

Would cities want to endlessly war with neighboring cities if they both used this system? I think probably not. Would such a city decide to defend itself if attacked by a neighboring aggressor? Almost certainly.

Some real world experiments in participatory budgeting on a city wide scale have proved interesting.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_budgeting

[Ludwig]

Exactly. Jack is saved from the savage hoard by the Naval Officer, as without the guiding paternal hand of absolute authority, you will all inevitably become 'savages', because hierarchy and competition - red in tooth and claw, no less - are the sole and 'natural' basis for human relationships. Therefore, submit to hierarchy and absolute authority and be grateful for it's civilizing influence and protection from yourselves..!

Is that the message? Is it really so cynical? It's a quarter of a century since I read the book; maybe today I'd read it differently from the 16-year-old me. But at the time, the message I got from it was much more ambiguous; not that authority saves us from ourselves, but rather that civilisation is a very fragile and artificial thing that can be destroyed in a generation.

Benign authority is better than no authority, and my perception of society in the 1970s was that it was mostly, in Britain, applied fairly. There was a lot of strife in that decade, but the sense that civilised values prevailed was not, I think, just a construct of my naive child mind. No doubt there was a lot going on beneath the surface, but generally people were decent to each other and - strange to believe today - it wasn't regarded as axiomatic that human beings were fundamentally selfish. Despite what Jonny2mad maintains, human nature isn't absolutely fixed, and if people are encouraged to be decent to each other, they find that actually the world is a nicer place to live in when they are.

[UndercoverElephant]

UE I think you have come up with the perfect system of governing a state.

So long as there are only 11 individuals who live in the state..

I often think that we get caught up in imagining that the proper scale for a political organisation is one of millions, or hundreds of millions of people. I am unsure why we so habitually make this assumption. We have ended up with states the size they are as a accident of history. There is nothing 'right' about the size of France or Germany. It is arbitrary.

My view is that diversity is good. We should have smaller states (city sized?) we as a species will still be greedy, powerhungry and occasionally inhumane, but these mistakes will be more local in character. There will be less concentrated power.

This would need to happen in the context of some binding international agreements, and perhaps an armed citizenry along the Swiss model to enforce it.

Sam,

I agree with that. I think that all power that could practically be devolved to "village level" (max 1000 people) should be. But you will still need some sort of organisation at the top deciding on laws which have to apply to everyone to stop those villages fighting with each other.

UE

[Mr. Fox]

...civilisation is a very fragile and artificial thing that can be destroyed in a generation.

Benign authority is better than no authority, and my perception of society in the 1970s was that it was mostly, in Britain, applied fairly. There was a lot of strife in that decade, but the sense that civilised values prevailed was not, I think, just a construct of my naive child mind. No doubt there was a lot going on beneath the surface, but generally people were decent to each other and - strange to believe today - it wasn't regarded as axiomatic that human beings were fundamentally selfish. Despite what Jonny2mad maintains, human nature isn't absolutely fixed, and if people are encouraged to be decent to each other, they find that actually the world is a nicer place to live in when they are.

Again, Ludwig, I'm agreement - people are not naturally selfish - hence the need for the program of indoctrination to convince us otherwise. J2M stands as testament to it's efficacy.

But we must be careful not to fall into the trap of assuming that in the absence of hierarchy there is no other possible organising principle ('Benign authority is better than no authority', etc).

To subscribe to that narrative is to reject a fundamental organising principle in nature that accounts for 99% of human evolutionary history.

History demonstrates, and common sense validates, that the assumption of hierarchal structure invalidates the actions of groups that would overthrow hierarchy.[2] Despite this logical truism, revolution after revolution proceed along the same path: revolutionaries assume hierarchal form to confront the strengths of hierarchies. The solution to hierarchy lies not in the failure of proper implementation (the standard critique of Marxist failures by Marxists), but in the fundamental structure of hierarchy itself. In order to resolve the deficiencies fundamental to the structure of hierarchy, we must, by definition, abandon hierarchy as an organizing principle. We must confront hierarchy with its opposite: rhizome.

Rhizome acts as a web-like structure of connected but independent nodes, borrowing its name from the structures of plants such as bamboo and other grasses. By its very nature, rhizome exhibits incompatibility with such critical hierarchal structures as domestication, monoculture-agriculture, division of labor and centralized government. Unlike hierarchy, rhizome cannot suffer exploitation from within because its structure remains incompatible with centralization of power.

http://www.jeffvail.net/2004/10/theory- ... ter-9.html

(Very good, insightful short book, by the way - well worth the effort to read in full)

[emordnilap]

(Very good, insightful short book, by the way - well worth the effort to read in full)

Interesting how someone who has happily participated in aggression against Iraq and Afghanistan starts his book by wondering about the forces that define development of power structures. I'll take your recommendation and read it, Mr. Fox, but he doesn't exactly get off on the right foot, does he?

[sam_uk]

"people are not naturally selfish - hence the need for the program of indoctrination to convince us otherwise"

I agree, yet I don't agree. You missed a 'only' from the above sentence

People are not 'only' naturally selfish, just as they are not 'only' naturally altruistic.

We are a complicated mix. I do agree that certain polictical or social structures can emphasise one tendency over another. I think it's a mistake to assume that without mass TV media everyone would suddenly become lovely.

I do think that freed from the 'might is right' narrative people would get a bit nicer, but not much.

We should design our societal systems so that the Alpha-male tendency to dominate, invade and rape, is minimised and contrained by counter societal pressures.

We should not however pretend to ourselves that those tendencies are just going to disappear when we have a different societal narrative.

[Mr. Fox]

Interesting how someone who has happily participated in aggression against Iraq and Afghanistan starts his book by wondering about the forces that define development of power structures. I'll take your recommendation and read it, Mr. Fox, but he doesn't exactly get off on the right foot, does he?

Indeed, he confesses that he planned 'the combined US-UK seizure of several critical nodes in Iraq’s southern oil export infrastructure.'

I think I first came across him via his posts on The Oil Drum. You have to dig down on his blog now to find his best stuff, e.g: stuff on The Problem of Growth,
The Rise of the Diagonal Economy and the Transition to Decentralization , some interesting ideas regarding Resilient Suburbia and his 2009 ASPO Presentation - "The Renewables Gap".

He's one of a growing number who seem to have taken what they've learned in the military and (perhaps because of what they participated in and saw) used it to apply 'systems thinking' to the sorts of problems we really should be looking at.

"people are not naturally selfish - hence the need for the program of indoctrination to convince us otherwise"

I agree, yet I don't agree. You missed a 'only' from the above sentence

People are not 'only' naturally selfish, just as they are not 'only' naturally altruistic.

We are a complicated mix. I do agree that certain polictical or social structures can emphasise one tendency over another. I think it's a mistake to assume that without mass TV media everyone would suddenly become lovely.

I do think that freed from the 'might is right' narrative people would get a bit nicer, but not much.

We should design our societal systems so that the Alpha-male tendency to dominate, invade and rape, is minimised and contrained by counter societal pressures.

We should not however pretend to ourselves that those tendencies are just going to disappear when we have a different societal narrative.

Absolutely, Sam. I'm being somewhat polemic.

There's been some interesting fairly recent work that suggest an evolutionary bias towards 'conditional co-operation':

This paper develops a model of social norms and cooperation in large societies. Within this framework we use an indirect evolutionary approach to study the endogenous formation of preferences and the coevolution of norm compliance. Thereby we link the multiplicity of equilibria, which emerges in the presence of social norms, to the evolutionary analysis: Individuals face situations where many others cooperate as well as situations where a majority free-rides. The evolutionary adaptation to such heterogenous environments will favor conditional cooperators, who condition their pro-social behavior on the others' cooperation. As conditional cooperators react flexibly to their social environment, they dominate free-riders as well as unconditional cooperators.

Furthermore, it may even be hard-wired.

Obviously, undoing the damage 10,000+ years of 'faulty meme' has inflicted on our culture isn't going to be easy, but it certainly isn't going to be as impossible as the indoctrination suggests.

The first step, I feel, must be to consign the 'humans are only like chimps, naturally aggressive and competitive' narrative to the dustbin.

Chimpanzees are horrible animals. They are. They're dominated by violent males. They engage in bloody boundary disputes during which patrols of several large males will gang up and kill stray male members of an opposing tribe. They'll kill and eat infant chimpanzees they find, and grab any females. They fight among each other constantly and violently.

Sound familiar?

Bonobos, meanwhile, are cooperative, relatively non-violent, and respond to unfamiliar problems, social stress, or conflicts by initiating wild bonobo sex parties. In theory, they're as like us as chimps are, but let's put it this way - there have been several brawls that have broken out on the floor of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, but no orgies.

However, a study published in a recent issue of PLOS Genetics indicates that chimps and bonobos are equally related to the common ancestor they share with humans. While chimps adapted to varied environments, bonobos stayed put in forests and remained in the same environment where they evolved. Their genetic codes have undergone fewer changes than those of chimps. This means that bonobos could be more closely related to humans than chimpanzees are - which might change the current cultural narrative a bit. Perhaps our heritage is not inventive and vicious violence, but cooperative groups working to ensure the survival of all.

[emordnilap]

He's one of a growing number who seem to have taken what they've learned in the military and (perhaps because of what they participated in and saw) used it to apply 'systems thinking' to the sorts of problems we really should be looking at.

That's what I was hoping.

[jonny2mad]

altruist-ism most likely evolved because it gave people with similar genes to you and your genes a better chance for survival, I don't think humans are naturally altruistic to everyone, they are in competition with other groups of humans so I think that would be pretty silly of them

Chimpanzees most likely act the way they do because its the best adaption to their environment .

quite a lot of animals aren't cooperative or altruistic to a great extent sharks aren't ,polar bears pretty much just get together to mate and then wander about on their own.

I don't see that this cooperative world you all seem to want is that great a idea, or something to aspire too, I think that idea has no future because we are entering a period where we have less and less and the competition for resources will get mighty fierce